“It’s never been a goal of mine, when I was younger, to be England captain.” And with that, even if only for an afternoon, there was a sense of reassurance. That Ben Stokes and his brand of aggressive honesty might be exactly what the game needs right now.
Those first orchestrated mutterings of a Test captain are usually the most bolshy and, thus, the least instructive. Promises made of future successes, peaks on the horizon to scale, blueprints for brands of cricket and other such speak you wish had stayed confined to its peculiar corner of high-performance Instagram.
